This was too entertaining to let pass..

<snipped from the bottom of the 2.2.4 release announcement by Ulrich Drepper>

And now for some not so nice things.

Stallman recently tried what I would call a hostile takeover of the glibc development. He tried to conspire behind my back and persuade the other main developers to take control so that in the end he is in control and can dictate whatever pleases him. This attempt failed but he kept on pressuring people everywhere and it got really ugly. In the end I agreed to the creation of a so-called "steering committee" (SC). The SC is different from the SC in projects like gcc in that it does not make decisions. On this front nothing changed. The only difference is that Stallman now has no right to complain anymore since the SC he wanted acknowledged the status quo. I hope he will now shut up forever.

The morale of this is that people will hopefully realize what a control freak and raging manic Stallman is. Don't trust him. As soon as something isn't in line with his view he'll stab you in the back. *NEVER* voluntarily put a project you work on under the GNU umbrella since this means in Stallman's opinion that he has the right to make decisions for the project.

The glibc situation is even more frightening if one realizes the story behind it. When I started porting glibc 1.09 to Linux (which eventually became glibc 2.0) Stallman threatened me and tried to force me to contribute rather to the work on the Hurd. Work on Linux would be counter-productive to the Free Software course. Then came, what would be called embrace-and-extend if performed by the Evil of the North-West, and his claim for everything which lead to Linux's success.

Which brings us to the second point. One change the SC forced to happen against my will was to use LGPL 2.1 instead of LGPL 2. The argument was that the poor lawyers cannot see that LGPL 2 is sufficient. Guess who were the driving forces behind this.

The most remarkable thing is that Stallman was all for this despite the clear motivation of commercialization. The reason: he finally got the provocative changes he made to the license through. In case you forgot or haven't heard, here's an excerpt:

[...] For example, permission to use the GNU C Library in non-free programs enables many more people to use the whole GNU operating system, as well as its variant, the GNU/Linux operating system.

This $&%$& demands everything to be labeled in a way which credits him and he does not stop before making completely wrong statements like "its variant". I find this completely unacceptable and can assure everybody that I consider none of the code I contributed to glibc (which is quite a lot) to be as part of the GNU project and so a major part of what Stallman claims credit for is simply going away.

This part has a morale, too, and it is almost the same: don't trust this person. Read the licenses carefully and rip out parts which give Stallman any possibility to influence your future. Phrases like

[...] GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

just invites him to screw you when it pleases him. Rip out the "any later version" part and make your own decisions when to use a different license since otherwise he can potentially do you or your work harm.

In case you are interested why the SC could make this decision I'll give a bit more background. When this SC idea came up I wanted to fork glibc (out of Stallman's control) or resign from any work. The former was not welcome this it was feared to cause fragmentation. I didn't agree but if nobody would use a fork it's of no use. There also wasn't much interest in me resigning so we ended up with the SC arrangement where the SC does nothing except the things I am not doing myself at all: handling political issues. All technical discussions happens as before on the mailing list of the core developers and I reserve the right of the final decision.

The LGPL 2.1 issue was declared political and therefore in scope of the SC. I didn't feel this was reason enough to leave the project for good so I tolerated the changes. Especially since I didn't realize the mistake with the wording of the copyright statements which allow applying later license versions before.

I cannot see this repeating, though. Despite what Stallman believes, maintaining a GNU project is *NOT* a privilege. It's a burden, and the bigger the project the bigger the burden. I have no interest to allow somebody else to tell me what to do and not to do if this is part of my free time. There are plenty of others interesting things to do and I'll immediately walk away from glibc if I see a situation like this coming up again. I will always be able to fix my own system (and if the company I work for wants it, their systems).

<end>

(shudder!!)

kishor

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